Voice to Voice

Voice to Voice is an interdisciplinary project combining field research, interviews, architecture, video installation, sound, and live performance to explore how contemporary society defines human value through labour and productivity. As the third chapter of the Value Trilogy, it extends the inquiry from the valuation of artworks and artists toward broader questions of self-worth, dignity, and professional identity. The work examines how social systems of labour become internalised in the language through which individuals narrate their own worth.

Developed from 2022 onward, the project is grounded in more than eighty in-depth interviews conducted across China with people from diverse social and professional backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, office workers, service employees, delivery drivers, factory workers, and rural labourers. A specially designed mobile interview wagon served simultaneously as a research instrument, a sculptural object, and a public space for collective reflection.

The installation consists of six listening booths presenting twelve edited interviews, a contextual video tracing the project’s journey, the mobile wagon itself, and a live performance in which the wagon is transformed into a jukebox-like device activated by the audience. Through intimate encounters with personal narratives of work, pressure, ambition, and dignity, Voice to Voice creates a collective space for listening and invites audiences to reconsider how human value might be understood beyond frameworks of productivity and economic output.